Gimme Shelter

 The quote "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" is attributed to Samuel Johnson and I have no reason to doubt that or its truth. These days we have to examine a number of things that now inhabit that foul habitat of 21st century Patriotism, like extreme politics and extreme religion and extreme dishonesty -- and in a year like this, at the beginning of another election cycle and the Christmas season, the Star Spangled Blather begins to stink the place up.

Take Donald Trump, always struggling to be first in line, he's thrown the first pitch of the annual War on Christmas season this year by preaching against the Starbucks Christmas coffee cup,  which is now simply red and without the type of commercial Northern Winter and Sears Roebuck iconography some religious Christians despise. I'm surprised actually to find Starbucks turning out something that close to tasteful and without a pseudo-European name, but the Donald assumes he can take that simple red cup and work you into a lather of religious outrage by explaining it all the Fox way. It's War on Christmas time once again and pretending that anyone ever told you not to say Merry Christmas is the lie behind the tyrannical  agenda  of legally requiring you to be not only a Christian but an ignorant, paranoid and militant one.

It takes a certain kind of malignant mendacity to insist that Starbucks Hates Jesus and a certain kind of unbalanced mind to believe it, but believers gotta believe, don't they -- and we're a nation of outrage addicts, not too particular about veracity. But Christmas in America wouldn't be Christmas at all without the imaginary war on it and Donald Trump wouldn't be the ruthless sociopath without the contorted, contradictory lies that make up his campaign. I won't give him credit for inventing it. Actually pious Christians invented antipathy to Christmas a long ago and Christmas has been banned periodically by Christian leadership, both here and abroad. There's nothing new under the sun or under the comically bad hairdo for that matter.

Americans and American business have been in love with the holiday for a century or more and in fact much of our Christmas iconography and tradition has been authored by big corporations to sell product. That bothers the "put Christ Back in Christmas" crowd no end. But drink your $20 Frappomachiadohalfcaffventi in a plain cup or a Merry Christmas Santa cup and you'll piss someone off, whether they think Jesus the Barrista or Jesus the Christ is being disrespected. Trump is playing both sides and playing against anything that resembles freedom of anything. Hardly anyone is buying his Crappuchino of course, red cup or otherwise, but Trump is not afraid to work the bottom of the barrel or any other deep, dark and fetid place, and the media are not hesitant to give it all the publicity it can.

In our America, religion and patriotism are one and the same refuge of more than one scoundrel and no Republican Patriot would dare give himself that flag-kissing title without bufoonicating about Jesus the conservative billionaire and his ever present "liberal" enemies. It's expected. Patriotism entails positing a mythical past greatness that needs to be returned to. A past which entails a return to military swagger, Religious authority, isolationism, xenophobia, repression, racism and a forced ethnic "purity" which means a Christians First Nation and Christian rule and Biblical Law and above all, a Snowman on your paper coffee cup. That, in fact seems to be the only consistent theme among any likely GOP candidate in recent years. A foolish consistency you might say, as it requires you to hate the commercialism of Christmas and the non-commercialism of Christmas equally. It's a sacred holiday, but don't call it a holiday, and if you go through a minute without saying Merry Christmas from September through New Years eve, you hate Jesus.

Trump threatens not to renew Starbucks' Trump Tower lease  - (just now after how many years?) He suggests we boycott them and promises that if he's elected we'll all be saying Merry Christmas. That's a sure thing of course because we are doing that already and have been for as long as I can remember. Christmas is the most celebrated holiday in the US and a large part of our economy depends on us continuing to do so.  How can we not notice that the Donald has no commitment to  freedom of worship or of speech?  In what bizarre world is this patriotic?  The USA of course.

Atheists say Merry Christmas, Jews and Muslims say Merry Christmas and I say Merry Christmas in full knowledge of it's pagan origins, all external to the Christian canon. I think that peace and compassion and good will are better symbols, even in a hypocritical world than animals with light-up noses and trees from the Boreal forests. Acknowledging the dignity of the poor, showing affection toward children - these make it worthwhile to me. They have nothing to do with Trump or the politics of hate, fear and arrogance he preaches.

Yes, you greedy old grinch, I'll be saying Merry Christmas on December 25th,  but not to you or because of you,  pissing on the people who follow other religions and those who really love Christmas for their own reasons and acknowledge it in their own way:  the kids, the grandparents and the people who like pretentious coffee in plain cups. Pissing on those who preach year round goodness for goodness' sake.  If there's anything good about the religion you pretend to, you're stepping on it. If there were laws against hate speech, you'd be spending the holiday in jail and if there really is a hell with punishment for sin, we'll all be drinking eggnog while you lie howling.

Newer is truer

The "true meaning" of Christmas.  That's something the news reader on CBS evening news knows and "those Atheists" who like to bother and annoy people like her don't know -- probably because they lack the good influences of  that religion history so thoroughly affirms as the source of peace and good will. Affirms  as the only bulwark between the undead and the damnation they all deserve.

It's about Festivus and it's bare pole tree replacement around which, whether in tongue in cheek mode or in deliberate mockery, some people  were celebrating that sarcastic alternative to Christmas with origins in the Seinfeld sitcom.  Yes, it's the annual war on Christmas, all wrapped up in colored paper. Christmas divisiveness, Christmas aggression, and Christmas fictions with which to assert Christian ascendancy and Christian victimhood at the same time.

But pay no mind, the young woman knows the True Meaning.

So which true meaning are we talking about?  Is it better to ask which  fictitious gods it's all about this time?  Certainly we know that the origins of  Winter Solstice holidays go back to our lower brow ancestors, their relief that days in the northern hemisphere were lengthening -- particularly those in higher latitudes than the tropic of Cancer, whence many of our customs and gods originated. The traces of the Norsemen are unmistakable as are the legacies of Roman Saturn and Greco-Persian deities like Mithras concerned with season change. It was celebrated on December 25 in the later Roman Empire as the Dies Natalis of Sol Invictus, the "Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun," of whom Constantine, the Romanizer of Christianity, was pontifex maximus.   Christmas has had more layers of accretion than an old piling covered with shells, worm casings and pelican shit. Let's not forget The Truth that as the major prop of consumerism in America, it's irreplaceable. Of all the saints in all the world, only St Nicholas is worth praying to.

I like to call it the Dondi effect: in which a story persists for eons while the names change to suit circumstances or objectives. 

For those who remember the  picaresque comic strip that started soon after WWII and was about a war-orphan boy named Dondi, adopted by GIs and brought home from Italy.  As memory faded and a new war emerged to produce a new crop of  orphans to sympathize with, Dondi quietly metamorphosed into a Korean.  He became Vietnamese with little fanfare some time later to keep up with our wars. Christmas, like any comic strip has been altered to fit, new patches sewn on to cover the holes left by obsolete gods and  deleted bits of history, as we tell new lies to cover the last lies as they become threadbare.

Thus the Sumerian flood hero Ziusudra, became the Accadian Utnapishtim, who became the Hebrew Noah and the details changed to fit the new characters and the new message from the new gods.  Holidays evolve and the day of Saturn becomes the day of  a failed Galilean revolutionary.  Is newer truer?  Must be if the CBS newsreader thinks so.  So no worries, we can always invent reasons to bring northern trees inside, to give presents, to hang mistletoe and make fires. We can always explain away the eggs and rabbits and the buns we used to eat for Mithras at Easter as well, as we fiddle with the calender to separate it from the holiday it used to be back before it got it's true meaning.

What goes around, comes around.

So here's me looking at this guy in the store selecting Christmas lights. He's got a little kid with him - shorts and tank top and skin covered top to bottom with graffiti like a subway car from the 60's. Looked like Bible quotes.  

"What the fuck you looking at?  You like my legs, huh?"  It's one of those "shoulda said" in retrospect moments, but  I didn't say "if you didn't want anyone to read it you should have tattooed it on your ass," discretion being very much the better part of valor particularly for someone who's left his Colt .380 at home since the Zimmerman incident.

So again, a bit later,  I'm about to pull into a parking space at the post office, sunny day, top down, feeling merry -- but there's a guy there - old dude about my age about to step in front on his way to the other side.  I stop and wave for him to go ahead because I'm polite to other geezers and good looking women. 

"What the fuck does that mean, asshole? What the fuck you wavin' at you cocksucker? I'm tryina walk, dooya fuckin'  mind?"  

"Merry fucking Christmas to you too, you crazy bastard" I said with a grin and getting out of the car. Not worried about this one.  The postal employee emptying the outside box pretended he saw and heard nothing, going postal being a metaphor for good reason.  Ran inside, grabbed the flat rate box I came for and saw Mr. Nice guy rummaging in his late model Mustang convertible for something in the console.

Now here's that better part of valor again. I didn't wait --  and once  again, didn't have weaponry in the car like so many other Floridians. If I had,  it would have been a felony just to have it there much less to take it out and show it, whether standing my ground or not, concealed weapon permit or not. 

Sometimes it's nice to have 400+ horsepower. So here's the old man in white beard, red sled with presents in the trunk pulling out on to Old Dixie Highway with Christmas spirit and lotsa tire smoke -- and he looks over his shoulder as he steps on the gas:   

Merry Christmas to all and y'all kiss my ass!

Christmas lies.

Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

And so it happens every year -- all year actually -- but most appallingly and undisguisedly around the time of Mithra's birthday. You know, Mithra, the son of god by a virgin mother and member of a holy trinity whose cult competed with Christianity for hundreds of years and in large part was the furnished apartment the Christians moved into when they went Roman. So who can be surprised that "Liberal" CNN would trot out another snotty attack on disbelief today, embedded in an interpretation of that mawkish box-office failure It's a Wonderful Life.

The annually erupting movie is a fitting metaphor for a nation absent Christian belief, author Larry Taunton says. Those wanting to do away with the faith should be careful what they wish for. 'Doing away with the faith' of course, means dissuading the faithful from running your life; dictating according to their own set of religious laws and demanding special exemption for their actions. They're sure as hell not equating faith in Indra or Thor with their equally unsupportable beliefs.

No, faith is good when it's Christian faith even when the faithful can't agree with what that is or whether angels are part of it or whether Quakers are heretics or just who it is the god of love hates most. Any other faith is simply satanic, regardless of content, else ol' Larry here would be giving the Zoroastrians with their strict sense of morality a free pass to heaven. And he doesn't.

Of course if there is a nation absent Christian belief, or more repellent, absent that cobbled together self-contradictory chimera they like to call (the Judeo-Christian ethic) it's not the USA and the conclusion that our waning belief is deadly to morality and stability and all other political, economic and tectonic woes including that "general malaise," is part of the same belief package. It's circular. To see that decline, one has first to believe in it, which is to say, if you believe it, it's true. If you're a Christian of the correct sort, it's true; which again is to say, nothing is true but what the Church tells you is true and Après nous le déluge.

Yes, indeed, it would be a sad day for America if people stopped questioning the notion that democracy ( which used to be held as evidence for decline and condemned by nearly every church ) universal suffrage, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the end of slavery and a more modern sense of morality that includes frowning upon child abuse, torture, spousal abuse and the torture of animals -- all things fine and dandy in the heyday of ecclesiastical tyranny -- were signs of the end times that Christians have been awaiting for 2000 years and which will never come. Why, insinuates this obnoxious Nosferatu from his ancient grave -- we might become savages in the moral vacuum departing Christianity leaves behind: wild and murderous barbarians like the French, Danes, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, English . . .

Face it, without faith that everything is going to hell, Christianity would long since have died out or at most be another kind of Judaism, and people like Larry Taunton would be lying to the empty air and raving to the bats in some secluded cave far away. As Nietzsche said: "The Christian determination to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad"

What the movie is trying to say, is that faith in ourselves will save the day and that's hardly what this damnable deceiver in his contempt for sanity is selling. In fact it's the very opposite and they just can't get through a December without spitting in the face of human values, denying their own bloody history and claiming to be the only rightful leaders of the world and insist they're right because they've made everything worse.

It's a Tax!

The War on Christmas, like the 'Black Friday' sales, began early this year. Faced with the growing difficulty of explaining how paying the Bush Administrations bills makes Obama a spendthrift and how asking for a smaller stimulus package makes him more reckless than Bush while all the time being a communist, Mau-Mau, Fascist, do-nothing tyrant, the need for ever more idiotic distraction generates the need to elevate even more mole-hills to Himalayan proportions. So this year, it's no longer about how that Muslim Obama and those damned Jews and atheists are at war with Christmas, it's about how that damned tax-tyrant Obama is making us pay more for it ( and costing us jobs. ) Welcome to the new act in the Republican circus: the Christmas Tree Tax.

The Christmas Tree Promotion, Research and Information Order, which was first proposed during the administration of President George W. Bush in response to the yapping of agricultural lobbyist Christmas Tree Promotion Now, gave the President authority to add a 15 cent charge to every tree to be used to advertise and promote Christmas trees. The government will not use these funds, the Christmas tree growers will use the money collected from retailers to promote further sales with the intention, or excuse that increased sales will more than offset the cost. It's kind of a capitalist idea, Republican style -- you know, like the $80 million-a-year beef promotion order imposed during the Reagan administration, or the $8 million-a-year peanut promotion order imposed during the Bush administration. But we're not talking about St Ronald or St George, we're talking about that anti-colonial Kenyan/Indonesian killer of African Christians who hates Christmas and white people.

It's a TAX! scream the headlines and the banshee bloggers. How can we expect anyone to hear the whisper of "it's capitalism" from the rational rest of us? Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax, howls the headline at The Foundry, the blustery blog of the Heritage Foundation hammering out their daily dumps of hammered, beaten, twisted and red hot baloney. Will there be another headline informing us that the President reconsidered the Bush program and cancelled it?

Season's greetings

If you thought there was a silly season in Florida, you're right. If you think the season is shorter than 52 weeks, then I would disagree, although a case can be made that as long as the legislature is in session, idiocy is in season.

But there are high points, special events worthy of special status, although which ones to celebrate differ from political faith to faith. I don't know how Florida's "smaller government" believers took the statement by one state representative against a bit of legislation forbidding anyone to participate in or watch for purposes of pleasure any sexual act including animals with the exception of the requirements of animal husbandry, but she seemed to understand that as allowing female humans to marry animals and she certainly opposed that, thank you very much. It's hard to stand out as an idiot in a Florida crowd, but perhaps the following resolution, which was introduced last Christmas Eve by Sen. Gary Siplin, an Orlando Democrat, that would designate "Merry Christmas" as the official state greeting for December 25 will come close:

WHEREAS, Christmas, a holiday of great significance to most Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world, and
WHEREAS, on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, and
WHEREAS, popular modern customs of the holiday include gift-giving, music, the exchange of greeting cards, a special meal, church celebrations, and the display of Christmas trees, lights, and nativity scenes, and
WHEREAS, many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world celebrate Christmas as a time to cherish and serve others, NOW, THEREFORE,
Be It Resolved by the Senate of the State of Florida:
That “Merry Christmas” is recognized as the State of Florida’s official greeting for December 25.

Can anyone make up stuff like this? I can't, and I wouldn't dare clog up the wheels of progress, if I'm still allowed to advocate it, with such Christmas fruitcake legislation while Florida is at the top of the unemployment and foreclosure heap. And yes, Siplin is a Democrat and no, there's no false equivalence here. I report, you decide and let the batshit fall where it may.

If it passes or does not, it's a gift to cynics that keeps on giving and it seems that every time the legislature meets it is indeed Christmas. Just don't ever call it a holiday.

Murdering Christmas

Make no mistake about it, what the insurgents are calling the War on Christmas is nothing but an assault on our religious freedom and like a dog with a bone, or a teenager on the telephone, they will not stop of their own accord.

"There are people out there who are rewriting history and people who are buying into it because they never learned history:"

said the fellow next to me at the bar, a former teacher whose wife is a Glenn Beck devotee. We nodded together like bobble head dolls although I knew full well we were envisioning the same people on the opposite side of the game. He wasn't talking about the Fox people, the Fundamentalists, the sinister bastards rearranging the sets and props and actors on the stage of history to further their lust for power. The TV Christianists doing it under the pretext of educating the public that real history is fake history -- and at this time of year, although there are many distractions, their tawdry tableau is arranged to display the fiction of the Christian Fathers who intended that this country, the United States of America, be a "Christian nation" in the same fashion as medieval Europe.

I'm not in a position to say that we ever had an educational system that didn't serve as political indoctrination. I do remember being 'taught' that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which institution was, as it was related, moribund already -- and of course General Custer was still being presented as a hero in my youth in the segregation era, but a long standing tradition of doing wrong is hardly an argument for continuing it, to anything but a reactionary mind.

"Can you imagine it? Some people are actually offended when I say Merry Christmas!"

said the man on TV. I turned on my new battery operated portable flat screen that I just bought as part of my home hurricane preparedness kit this morning and was reminded of the fact that if one can only get broadcast TV in this area, at least half of what you can receive are Jesus channels. Note that I didn't say Christian. There's a difference. Frankly, I've never encountered offense at these words, although I have seen the Pavlovian reaction: "well you can't say that any more." Yes you can.

"Can you imagine it, some schools are having 'Winter festivals!' What do they say? Merry cold weather? I don't like cold weather, I like CHRISSSSSSSSSTMAS!"

Indeed some people look carefully in your face to gauge any hidden reaction when they say the formula. Merry Christmas, for the next week is a test, a shibboleth, not a wish. "Are you one of us?"

Yes, some people are rewriting history, making up stories about Christmas being made illegal, Christians being persecuted; about big-box home improvement stores ignoring Christmas and acknowledging holidays of nefarious, un-American religions. They're good enough at the game and we're gleefully gullible enough that we can stand in the middle of an acre of Christmas trees in the Home Depot parking lot, arms laden with the Christmas junk just purchased inside, and believe that the undoubtedly MuslimJewishAtheist owners thereof are trying to take away your right to worship trees and reindeer and a jolly fat saint. Merry Christmas -- say it often - say it ugly.

And they're not going to stop. They're not going to go away. They're not going to shut up until enough of us shout them down and make what used to be a happy season into the war they, in their sinister, apocalyptic insanity, so devoutly wish for.

All I want for Christmas is a silver bullet

Christmas in these new dark ages is like a full moon to werewolves and lunatics and the USA is the new Transylvania. You can almost hear them howling at night. In the dark, ruined castle of the House of Representatives, the latest time wasting assault on truth, the Constitution, freedom of religion and the Founding Fathers is H. RES. 951, a resolution drafted by 19 house Republicans stating:

Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and

Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment of the Constitution, in prohibiting the establishment of religion, would not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;

(2) strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and

(3) expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions by those who celebrate Christmas.

The framers have been framed once again, it seems. Of course there is no prohibition against "mentioning" religion, but there sure as Madison is one against promoting one religion over another and establishing support for any belief or ceremony or symbol is as prohibited as Jefferson could make it -- the ignorant passion of the lawless Republican denialists notwithstanding.

No I'm not going into the open hostility the Constitution writers had toward organized religion and it's influence on Government, or the largely fraudulent claims that "liberals" hate Christmas and Christians and want to take away your Christmas tree. You either already know or you're one of the hairy palmed lycanthropoids too demented to listen. For my part however, any party that harbors such Visigoths (yes they were Christian) is illegitimate to the core, an enemy of religious freedom and unworthy to participate in government on any level.

Is it humorous that the only real effort to stamp out Christmas and its various and ever changing "traditions" was by the "pilgrim fathers" we just finished pretending were the founders of American democracy. It would almost be laughable if these worms weren't eating the heart out of liberty by trying to restore exactly the sort of government we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of.

We've got 15 more days of raging Republicans who are going to make up stories about stores not having Christmas trees, towns banning lights or private business owners not having the right to call Christmas a holiday -- or private citizens not having the right to celebrate it or not celebrate it when and how they please. We have at least two more weeks of support for tyranny and attacks on our freedom of speech, press and religion. It's more than just some Scrooge, more than just some Grinch stealing everyone's good time, it's the ancient evil of religious authority stealing our birthright and for me, the holiday I used to love is hardly worth it any more.

Just a baby

Why is Fox News so damned afraid of secular Humanism? They're not of course; they're afraid of failing ratings and growing irrelevance, so they tell me once again and right on schedule that I'm at war with my favorite holiday because I'm not at war with my freedom -- and yours. If you think that virtue is its own reward or that doing the right thing by others whether or not you're rewarded for it is by definition the right thing: in fact, if you believe in freedom of thought, perhaps you're at war with Christmas too.

Last year, the American Humanist Association ran an ad asking "Why believe in a God?" They did it again this year with No God ...No Problem signs on city buses and the point of the slogan Be Good for Goodness Sake although certainly not out of line with most religious teachings, can according to the slimy logic of Bill O'Reilly, not only be a direct slander against God, but worse; an attack on the poor, helpless, little baby Jesus.

"How do you sell Atheism by running down a baby"

asks lyin' Bill so glibly that he can hope that the right people won't notice that being a good person, having compassionate and kindly humanist values, isn't likely to run down anyone's baby.

Blindingly blond and botoxed Margaret Hoover and Gretchen Carlson grinned in frightening fashion during last Thursday's "Culture Warriors" episode although the 85 year old O'Reilly couldn't seem to remember which was who. Perhaps the beauty pageant grins were as sewn on as they looked or perhaps the grotesque lengths Fox has gone to demonstrate the dangers of freedom simply amused them, but Grinning Gretchen opined that

"This is a direct and deliberate smear against Christianity. Do you think they would do this ad in July?"

Well, St. Swithyn's day seems hardly worth the effort and after all, December is in some vague and fact-free fashion "the most sacred month" Easter notwithstanding. There's little of ritually sacred nature in July that needs to be forced down the throats of heretics, while December contains other holidays of other religions and the birthdays, of Horus, Mithra, Constantine's favorite Sol Invictus and other Jesus predecessors -- but never mind. She managed to sneak in the proposition that not being Christian, not loudly professing faith that Jesus was born coincidentally on the same day as the Roman and Persian gods he replaced and not in April as their Gospels state, is an attack on our established State Religion.

"Do you think they would do it against Allah on Ramadan? I don't think so! No."

said Lyin' Bill in turn and nicely adding the subliminal hint that the growing secularism of the Western world is actually to be laid at the feet of our Islamic President.

"Why does the American Humanist Society want us to be 'good for goodness sake'? Why do they loathe the baby Jesus? He's just a baby."

What a marvelous way to heap fallacy upon fiction upon fraud and turn it into a call to battle. Is it really offensive to anyone's religion to recommend that in doing good unto others, one should not do it for reasons of prestige or self elevation - or that being a good person without doing it from fear of a vengeful son of a god is not really good?

Allowing people to believe or doubt or disbelieve anything they like can only be offensive to a religion that seeks only to convert and control and not to improve mankind. That's just the kind of religion and perhaps the kind of politics O'Reilly and his attendant familiars would be advocating if they really were advocating anything rather than fabricating reasons for rage in those whose mental capabilities don't extend to debunking a train of logic leading from "we don't have to believe in your god to be good" to "Why do they loathe the baby Jesus? He's just a baby."

The real questions of course are about why the two-bit Torquemada clones at Fox News loathe people who aren't fundamentalist Christian Conservatives, why lying and bearing false witness in the service of a myth is not loathsome while freedom of thought is an offense to the "baby Jesus."

'Tis the season

Yes, they're still pushing the "Obama is a Muslim" thing and one of the reasons must be that a central theme of the last presidential contest was that he was not only "the most liberal senator in American History," but a Marxist, a concept that is getting harder and harder to pin on our rather deliberate, frustratingly centrist and sometimes rather too conservative president. After all, an absurd claim is harder to counter and outrageous fabrications draw followings in inverse proportion to evidentiary support.

Legalizing 'Drugs' or prostitution are out of the question as a spur to the economy said President Obama to a student in Allentown Pennsylvania yesterday. Regardless of his reasons for the statement, it's not the opinion of a "far left socialist radical" trying to make us just like European Socialists. Better to rave about conspiracies to pass a Kenyan off as a native born American because the evidence is, that Obama is at best a centrist on social issues like allowing gays to serve in the military and no more of a Marxist than anyone at Goldman Sachs.

If only the knuckle draggers behind the Muslim libel wouldn't try to give evidence for it! The idiot mayor of some two-bit suburb of Memphis is blogging that the President's speech on Tuesday announcing 30,000 extra troops to fight Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan deliberately was scheduled to pre-empt that night's broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas , with its "Christian message" because as a Muslim, he hates our holiday "traditions." After all, Jesus himself watched the program as a child, didn't he? That's not of course, even contorted logic, it's bullshit. I would love to ask Mayor Russell Wiseman if Franklin Roosevelt was a closet Shinto supporter for choosing the Christmas season to ask Congress to declare war on Japan.

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."

said the ironically named Wiseman. Sorry, Russ, the answer is none of your damned business and none of the Government's business as concerns what any of us think about God, Christmas, Charlie Brown, the Son of God or the Son of Sam. The question is whether we consider you as a traitor for giving aid and comfort to the Taliban by calling Obama one of them, or for misrepresenting the Constitution and advocating that we replace it with your infantile and ignorant beliefs.

If this is Conservative thought in America then all our asylums are filled with Republicans.

The war that wasn't

Well the election is over, but the struggle will go on forever -- the struggle to pretend there's a War on Christmas, that is. As early as a week before the election, e-mails were hitting the web claiming Home Depot had plenty of Hanukkah stuff but no mention of Christmas: none. The one I got was in the form of a letter from Donald Wildmon, Chairman of the American Family Association and excoriates the "politically correct" people for "censoring" Christmas. It urges you to e-mail Home Depot and warns you that these villains may "block" your message.

As usual with messages that mention "family Values" or contain pictures of the flag or the World Trade Center in flames, it's bullshit designed to elicit the knee jerk reaction American jerks can be depended upon to make. By "Politically Correct" of course, they mean Jews and perhaps atheists: anyone who isn't supportive of making this secular Republic into Jesustan, complete with mandatory religious observances, oaths and recitations.

Some people would think that October 27th would be a bit early to start flooding the web site with Christmas promotions. Customers typically are out buying Halloween supplies and decorations at that point, but apparently the AFA is more concerned with their bogus message than with any pretense to objectivity. While stores seem to be pushing Christmas stuff earlier and earlier recently, it's probably done out of desperation born of the economic crisis and not from the demented sputterings of Wildmon's wildcats. Home Depot already has Christmas ads up and it's still weeks before Thanksgiving. Christmas is the only holiday mentioned by name.

I'm sure Fake News will be picking up the story and running with it soon enough, but check for yourself. It's Christmas time at Home Depot, just as it was last year when these miscreants insisted no Christmas trees were for sale at Home Depot, only Jew stuff. Of course last year, the local HD had at least half an acre of them and I'm sure it will once again, once it's actually the Christmas season.

Still, there will be believers and believers will believe and Fox News and AFA and all the other people and organizations for whom Jesus weeps will be helping their delusions. They're not doing it for Jesus, they've been defeated at the polls and must redouble their efforts to snap and grasp at the ankles of Lady Liberty like predatory animals, hoping to bring her down.

Perhaps you'd like to contact the American Family Association and tell them what you think about their war on religious freedom. Perhaps you'd like to tell them that Christmas is a national holiday, and nobody in the government will ever tell you not to say Merry Christmas or will try to ban the holiday, nor is anyone "trying to silence the Christians" by asking them not to silence the rest of us. Perhaps you'd like them to stop trying to bully private businesses and private citizens into observing any holiday according to the proclamations of the AFA.

Pretending to be a victim; telling people that some group is trying to silence them and stifle them
is a time-honored tool of tyrants, particularly those who are trying hard to silence and stifle the public. There is no war on Christmas and the only people who every tried to get Christains to stop celebrating it were other Christians. It's a lie, it's a ploy, it's a trick and it's a war on freedom; a war that we lose by losing our freedom.

The AFA is your enemy whether you love Jesus or never heard of him. The AFA is your enemy if you love America as it was intended to be. Call them, write them, let them know.